American Composers Forum

What do a gamelan orchestra, a St. Louis beer vendor and a Mississippi railroad have in common? They're all part of a project called "Continental Harmony," the largest music-commissioning undertaking in American history, according to its sponsor, the service organization American Composers Forum, headquartered in St. Paul, Minn.

What do a gamelan orchestra, a St. Louis beer vendor and a Mississippi railroad have in common? They're all part of a project called "Continental Harmony," the largest music-commissioning undertaking in American history, according to its sponsor, the service organization American Composers Forum, headquartered in St. Paul, Minn.

Living composers need love, too, not to mention networking opportunities and other professional aid. They work in solitude with or without commissions, and they usually have to rely on others to bring their notes to life. They're generally underappreciated and underpaid in the ranks of the high-culture work force, yet the urge to compose, once embedded, defies all adversity. What better recipe could there be for the need to organize?

Living composers need love, too, not to mention networking opportunities and other professional aid. They work in solitude with or without commissions, and they usually have to rely on others to bring their notes to life. They're generally underappreciated and underpaid in the ranks of the high-culture work force, yet the urge to compose, once embedded, defies all adversity. What better recipe could there be for the need to organize?

The Penderecki String Quartet will play a free program of works by four Los Angeles composers on Tuesday at 10 a.m. at LACMA West, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. The composers -- Martin Loyato, Juhi Bansal, Mario Berlinguer and Yusuf Lateef -- also will have their works discussed by quartet members: violinists Jeremy Bell and Jerzy Kaplanek, violist Christine Vlajk and cellist Simon Fryer.

Famed jazz and pop singer-composer Bobby McFerrin will lead the final program of the Pacific Chorale's 2000-01 season, the organization announced Wednesday. McFerrin will conduct a program of Brahms and Schubert, as well as his works, at 8 p.m. May 19, 2001, at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. Music director John Alexander will conduct the other three programs, also at the center: 7 p.m. Oct. 22, music by Bach and Handel, with Los Angeles-based Musica Angelica; 7 p.m. Dec.

The Pacific Symphony will focus on contemporary composers in the "Year of the American Composers Festival," in its 2002-03 classical music season. The festival--which will be highlighted by a competition for new American music--will showcase the music of Pulitzer winner William Bolcom. Carl St.Clair will conduct the first West Coast performances of Bolcom's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience"--settings of poems by William Blake that require more than 250 performers--on Feb. 5-6.

What was this thing called "earjam II," you ask? It's hard to say, and therein lies its charm. Twenty-five acts played Friday and Saturday, part of the downtown Side Street Projects, on the far side of classical, jazz, pop and other traditions. Each had individual artistic purpose, but all leaned into the winds of improvisation and experimentalism. One upshot, as heard on Saturday's four-hour-plus program, was a sense that the musical fringe is alive and well in Los Angeles.

Almost everyone in classical music these days makes well-meaning noises about reaching out to the Latino community, but the Long Beach Symphony actually did something significant about it. Saturday night at the Terrace Theatre, the orchestra and its music director, Enrique Arturo Diemecke, gave the U.S. premiere of an arresting multimedia piece called "Dos Visiones." Two visions indeed, for everywhere you looked, there were pairs.

It's been said in some circles that you can tell the gender of a composer simply by listening to the music. But can you really? "You can't," says Pamela Madsen, who founded the Women in New Music Festival, taking place this weekend at Cal State Fullerton, in part to address just such issues. "Some women do celebrate the idea of themselves as women," she adds. "But some women don't. There are just as many diverse voices among women as among men."

In an ambitious bid to unite Romeo and Juliet in Texarkana and install Othello in Anchorage, the National Endowment for the Arts on Wednesday announced details of a new Shakespearean touring program aimed at reaching 100 communities in 50 states. The announcement in Washington -- made on the 439th anniversary of the day Shakespeare is thought to have been born -- depends upon a collaboration of six regional theater companies, the nonprofits Arts Midwest (based in Minneapolis) and the NEA.